Emotions play a vital role in customer relationships. How to ensure that your customers feel good about you.
Any customer experience (CX) professional will tell you that building customer loyalty is hard work. But we often get so tied up in CSAT scores, journey maps and time-to-resolution metrics that we overlook the importance of emotion in the jobs we do.
It’s fitting during February, the “month of love,” to remember that a company’s relationship with its customers is a lot like a personal relationship. Sure, there are squabbles. There are times when things don’t go as well as we would like. But a relationship built on trust and confidence can withstand the bumps in the road, and grow into something enduring for the long term. Emotions play a vital role—not only in personal relationships, but as recent studies show, in business relationships too.
A January 2018 report by Forrester Research titled, How Firms Help Employees Evoke Emotions That Deepen Customer Loyalty, states that emotion is the strongest driver of customer loyalty in 20 of the 21 industries included in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™). When customers associate positive emotions with a brand, they are more likely to forgive a glitch, pay a price premium and remain a customer over the long term.
I’ve heard more than one CX expert quote the poet Maya Angelou, who said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That’s emotion—and it’s a great mantra for anyone working to develop customers for life. In fact, Customers4Life is the name of the CX program at Verint, the B2B technology company I work for. Our strategy is built around finding ways to help our customers excel and build lasting relationships. From the front office to the back office, and from the C-suite to middle managers and frontline sales and support, everyone is involved and has a role to play in our Customers4Life culture.
So what can you do to help ensure your customers feel good about you?
Listen Personally and Digitally
Verint collaborated on its latest global consumer study, which confirmed that, even in our digital world, consumers still appreciate in-person or telephone interactions with a company, especially when dealing with issues more complex than an address change or refund request. There are definite skills that contact center agents and store associates should use to be sure the interactions are positive and productive. But there are also things that companies can do that stir the same good feelings from the digital experience.
For example, new digital feedback management tools make it possible for customers to log a comment from any page of a website or mobile app, or during an online chat session with a contact center agent. The tools then use analytics to route the comment to the appropriate staff member or department for handling. Other tools make it easy for contact center managers to reward agents for exemplary customer care or plan training sessions for improvement. Most important, though, is that the company has set up an avenue for customers to make their feelings known quickly and easily. It sends a loud and clear message that, “We want to hear from you.” And this goes a long way to help digital interactions be as connected, welcoming and convenient as possible.
Online communities are also valuable digital listening tools. They give the brand a voice and give customers an online place to connect with the business and with each other. It’s also an effective way to keep a dialogue going year-round with your customers, not just once a year at the annual user conference.
Be a Proactive Communicator
As consumers ourselves, most CX professionals have a favorite horror story about unfortunate encounters with contact center agents who didn’t trigger kind emotions. Many involve lack of follow-up and continuity—being bounced from one agent to another while trying to get your issue resolved, having to repeat the problem from department to department, and/or having to call back to check the status.
In my experience, most customers don’t expect immediate resolution, but they do expect you to keep them updated and let them know you’re on top of the problem and haven’t forgotten about them. You might not be thrilled about the fact that your spouse is on a two-week business trip, but the nightly calls, texts and/or emails help a lot, don’t they? It’s the same principle with proactive communication in business—a major tenet of our Customers4Life program.
It’s rare for a customer issue to be resolved on the first call, especially in a complex B2B world. Many contact centers cite average handle time or first-call resolution as measures of success. We don’t use either of those metrics for assessing the customer experience. When deciding this, we looked at our customer data and knew that what was important to our customers was issue resolution time. It’s one of our chief CX metrics because it’s focused on the customer’s perspective. And we don’t call an issue closed until the customer says so.
In a B2B environment, it’s vital to have frequent and positive follow-up communications with customers. It says, “We care.” And that’s a great way to show customers a little love, isn’t it?
Neither do we let customer responses to surveys go unacknowledged—whether they are positive or negative. While there is immense value in addressing any concerns raised by customers, it’s equally important to follow up with those who are complimentary in their responses. In addition to developing action plans for dissatisfied customers, we ask happy respondents about their willingness to be references. Most of them are happy to do so.
Have Fun
Every company has its own definition of customer satisfaction. Many B2C companies strive to delight their customers with the right pair of shoes, a day-early delivery or a discount coupon for an item they’ve been lusting over.
In the B2B world, it’s a little different. We want our customers to be delighted with our work, of course, but more important is knowing they are confident that they’re valued partners that we’ll go the extra mile for. It’s safe to say that the “warm and fuzzies” aren’t as prized in our environment—but that doesn’t stop us from having fun with our customers and offering them occasional perks to show our appreciation.
At our annual customer conference, for example, we find ways to involve the hotel in the spirit of welcome. Room keys branded with our company and event branding, along with branded bottles of water for attendees at check-in and goodie bags at registration, add a special touch that goes beyond the mention of the conference on the hotel’s daily event board. Throughout the event, we encourage a spirit of fun with great motivational speakers and entertainment. Our customer appreciation event is a celebratory atmosphere with themes ranging from Chicago speakeasies to Las Vegas casinos.
And just as we have incorporated gamification in our employee engagement strategies, we also deploy it for customer engagement. When we connect our customer advocates with prospects, we award points whenever the advocates share information about their experience with our company—points that can be redeemed for event tickets, apparel or gift cards for various items or in-flight movies. We also prepare a list of questions—such as “who is your favorite football team”—to help the advocates get to know the prospects and discover common interests they can share throughout their professional relationship. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it starts things off on the right foot.
Above All, Make It an Enterprisewide Effort
As I mentioned, having a commitment to CX from the C-suite down is one of the most important ingredients in a successful Customers4Life program. Our senior executives do unique things day-to-day to demonstrate that commitment. One of them has a personal goal to know every customer’s first name. Another has a core set of values for his team that he shares with customers, while one other measures team members’ success by how well they listen to customers and understand what they are trying to achieve. And another accomplished a personal, professional goal to meet 100 customers in his first 100 days at the company.
These are next-generation senior executives who look beyond their respective areas of responsibility. They look for ways to make the customer’s life easier. They work hard to enhance employee engagement to support that goal. And they rely on customer insights to help them develop new strategies.
As one of our senior leaders says: “We tell our employees that they can do no harm by doing the right thing for the customer.” If that’s not customer love, I don’t know what is.